Schalanggor is a folktale from the Monguor people, a Mongolic people that live in China (Qinghai). In it, a father finds a flower from a youth's garden and is forced to give his youngest daughter to him in marriage - an event that is fortunate for the youngest daughter. Out of jealousy, the girl's sister conspires to take her place and kills her. The heroine, then, goes through a cycle of transformations, regains human form and takes revenge on her sister. The tale is related to the cycle of the animal bridegroom, but scholars consider it a narrative that developed in East Asia, since most of the tales are attested in China and Taiwan.

Source Folklorist Erika Taube translated the tale to German, which was first collected from a Monguor source in Qinghai, China.

Summary In this tale, an old man has three daughters. One day, his youngest daughter asks him to bring her a flower when he goes to cut firewood in the forest. The man cuts firewood and returns without the flower. His daughter reiterates her request, and gives him some buttered biscuits in order to remind him of the request. The next morning, the man tries to locate the flower, but cannot see anyone in the forest, until he finds a flower near a wall. He goes to cut with his axe, when the axe handle falls. He goes to look for the missing part and finds it inside a house that belongs to a man named Schalanggor. The man explains he lost his axe when he tried to cut a flower behind Schalanggor's house, and Schalanggor asks him why. The man explains the flower is for his daughter, and Schalanggor makes a deal: the axe handle and the flower in exchange for one of his daughters as his bride. The man returns home with the flower and gives it to his daughter, explaing the situation to the three girls. The elder two refuse to go with Schalanggor, save for the youngest. Schalanggor appears to take his bride, but the girl asks him to do some tasks first: first, to make a trail between both houses; next, to plant trees along the road and have birds singing on them; third, to spread brown and white felt between both houses. After Schalanggor performs each task, the girl goes with the man to his house. She wears fine clothes, while her husband sows the fields and herds the cattle. One day, the girl pays a visit to her family, and her elder sisters begin to feel envy, since their cadette is wearing fine clothes. One of the sisters asks their cadette to accompany her to the river to play: they throw their washing beatsticks, the elder's of wood and the youngest's of silver, and the youngest's sinks in the water. The elder sister shoves the youngest in the water, puts on her clothes, then runs back to Schalanggor's house to pretend she is his wife. The man notices her face is riddled with scars, the voice is not the same, and the woman lies that, while she was at her mother's house, the scars are from peas she put on her face and she sang so much her voice faltered. Schalanggor believes her story. The next morning, he goes to give water to his horse, when a seabird flies in next to the horse's mouth, and Schalanggor asks the bird to perch on his shoulder if he is someone that "belongs to him". The seabird perches on his shoulder and he brings it home to place inside a cage. The false wife dislikes the bird, kills it and buries it. From its grave, a thornbush sprouts, which tears the false wife's clothes. The woman burns the bush, and goes to draw water. The smoke from the burnt bush suddenly appears next to the sister's face and clouds her eyes, causing her to fall in the water. The smoke then materializes back into Schalanggor's true wife. She rejoins her husband and they live happily together.

Analysis Tale type Taube classified the tale as Mongolian type ("Mongolische Märchentyp") MMT 152, and recognized that the story contained two "well-known" fairy tales: "Beauty and the Beast" (in regards to the youngest's present request for her father) and "The False Bride" (in regards to the heroine's elder sister shoving her in water and taking her place as the supernatural husband's wife).

Mongolian tale type MMT 152

Hungarian orientalist László L. Lőrincz established the classification of the Mongolian tale corpus, published as Mongolische Märchentypus ("MMT"). In his system, in Mongolian tale type MMT 152, Die böse Schwester ("The Evil Sister"), a man goes to fetch flowers for his daughter in the forest, but loses his axe; a youth appears and gives him the axe and the flowers, in return for one of the man's daughters; the man's youngest daughter (the heroine) agrees to marry the youth, but demands some tasks first (e.g., building a bridge between their houses); after they marry, the heroine's elder sister drowns her and takes her place, but she survives and goes through a cycle of reincarnations, including a bird; the heroine is restored at the end of the tale.Lörincz, Laszló. Mongolische Märchentypen. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó; Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1979. p. 91. Lörincz compared the tale to parts of AT 425C, "Beauty and the Beast", and the final part of AT 403A, "The Black and White Bride".Lörincz, Laszló. Mongolische Märchentypen. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó; Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1979. p. 91.

Chinese tale type 433D In the first catalogue of Chinese folktales, devised by folklorist Wolfram Eberhard in 1937, Eberhard abstracted a Chinese folktype he termed Der Schlangenmann ("The Serpent Husband"). In this type, indexed as number 31 in his catalogue, a man with many daughters marries his youngest daughter to a snake or snake spirit as a promise for a favour; the snake and the girl live happily, enticing the jealousy of the eldest sister; the eldest sister shoves the youngest sister into a well and takes her place; the youngest sister becomes a bird, then a tree (or bamboo), regains human form and unmasks her treacherous sister.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. pp. 47-48.

Chinese folklorist and scholar established a second typological classification of Chinese folktales, and abstracted a similar narrative sequence. He named this tale type 433D, "The Snake Husband"Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. FF Communications, no. 223. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. pp. 73-74. (or "The Snake and Two Sisters").Zhang, Juwen. “Rediscovering the Brothers Grimm of China: Lin Lan”. In: The Journal of American Folklore 133, no. 529 (2020): 297. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.133.529.0285.

In a joint article in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, European scholars Bengt Holbek and John Lindow described it as a "Chinese oikotype".Holbek, Bengt; Lindow, John. "König Lindwurm (AaTh 433, 433 A–C)". In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Band 8: Klerus – Maggio. Edited by Rudolf Wilhelm Brednich; Hermann Bausinger; Wolfgang Brückner; Helge Gerndt; Lutz Röhrich. De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 162. . https://www.degruyter.com/database/EMO/entry/emo.8.037/html In that regard, researcher Juwen Zhang indicated that type 433D, "Snake boy/husband and two sisters", is an example of local Chinese tale types that are not listed in the international ATU index.Juwen Zhang. Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. p. 30. .

Relation to other tale types

Ting described tale type 433D as a combination of the initial part of type 425C, "Beauty and the Beast", and the second part of type 408.Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. FF Communications, no. 223. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. p. 73. Likewise, in the article about tale type King Lindworm in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Holbek and Lindow noted that Ting's new tale type combined motifs of ATU 425C, "Beauty and the Beast"; the heroine's transformation sequence that appears in tale type ATU 408, "The Love for Three Oranges", and the bird transformation from tale type ATU 720, "The Juniper Tree".Holbek, Bengt; Lindow, John. "König Lindwurm (AaTh 433, 433 A–C)". In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Band 8: Klerus – Maggio. Edited by Rudolf Wilhelm Brednich; Hermann Bausinger; Wolfgang Brückner; Helge Gerndt; Lutz Röhrich. De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 162. . https://www.degruyter.com/database/EMO/entry/emo.8.037/html

Taiwanese scholarship also recognizes some proximity between the Chinese tale type, the French story Beauty and the Beast (father plucks rose from the Beast and is forced to surrender him his daughter) and Italian The Three Oranges (heroine goes through cycle of transformations, including bird and tree), but emphasize that the European stories deal with love between heroine and hero, while the crux of the Chinese tale is the rivalry between a younger sister who married into good financial circumstances and her elder sister, wanting what the other has.

According to Christine Shojaei-Kawan's article, Walter Anderson, in his unpublished manuscript on The Three Oranges, identified a "Chinese mixed redaction" between the Snake Husband tale (which he listed as type AT 433A) and type 408, "The Three Oranges", in that the heroine is murdered and goes through a cycle of incarnations. However, Shojaei-Kawan considers that the motif of the transformation cycle already exists in South and East Asia unrelated to type 408, and suggests that the "mixed redaction" could be treated as an independent tale type.Shojaei-Kawan, Christine (2004). "Reflections on International Narrative Research on the Example of the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folklore (Electronic Journal of Folklore), XXVII, pp. 32-33.

Motifs

In his folktype system, Eberhard indicated that the number of sisters also varies between tales.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. p. 49.

The heroine's father is ordered to surrender his daughter after he steals some of the snake's flowers from its garden, or asked to deliver her as the snake's reward for a favour (e.g., cutting all trees or retrieving his axe handle).

The snake husband In his folktype system, Eberhard indicated that in some of the variants, the supernatural husband is a snake, snake spirit or a dragon, and another type of animal in others.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. p. 49. He also agreed that the motif of the snake husband seemed very old.Eberhard, Wolfram. Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1937. p. 51.

In Ting's catalogue, the snake husband assumes human form, but it can also be a "flower god", a wolf, or a normal man.Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. FF Communications, no. 223. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. p. 73.

The heroine's replacement The heroine is drowned by her sister when she is convinced to bathe or to take a look at their reflections in water. In her cycle of transformations, she may change into many objects: a cradle, a baby carriage, a spindle, or a type of food (bread, or, as in Taiwanese variants, a red tortoise cake).

Variants

Distribution